In the recent years, with the increase of portable electronic products, the flash memory technology and commercial application is getting mature. These portable electronic products, such as digital camera, cell phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), Game boy, portable memory, Programmable IC, and Digital Television etc., use Flash memory as the information storage or temporary storage.
A flash memory is a kind of Non-Volatile Memory, which in case of the loss of electricity protects the information stored in the memory from disappearing by changing the threshold voltage of transistor or memory cell to control the switch of the gate and channel in order to access the stored information.
In general, the evaluating standard for the practical efficiency of flash memory includes storage capacity, storing speed, electricity consumption, and life span (taking into account the number of times rewritten) and so on. With the progress of micro processes, the increasing storage capacity as well as storing speed and electricity-consumption reduction of the flash memory are substantially promoted. The progress of the related technology regarding the life span of memory is relatively less so. However, for many consumer electronic products, which usually need to store quantity of information in a short time, such as recordable digital television etc., their life time is often decided by the durability of the memories thereof.
For example, the well known Pause TV needs to continuously write broadcasted television frames into its inner flash memories since a user can press the pause button at any time. Therefore, the flash memories inside the Pause TV always have a shorter life time than other devices.
In the past, common methods adopted for extending the life time of the flash memory are nothing more than to increase the memory capacity or to reduce the bits transmitted rate, i.e. to decelerate the information writing and reading speed to extend the life time of the memory. However, these approaches will substantially decrease the efficiency of the flash memories.
In order to extend the life time of the flash memory and avoid the inefficiency caused by above-mentioned approaches, an encoding method and programming device for the flash memories are provided by the inventor via the devoting research and diligent work.